Note that it's not a Windows nmake problem, I get a similar error when running make in cygwin.

My system: MS Windows 7.

(By the way, I have been running ActiveState Perl fine, and there, PPM downloads and installs Carp with no problem.
The reason I've switched to Strawberry/DWIM Perl, is that I'd like to run a debugger, and Padre's latest version on ActiveState is 0.86, which is buggy. So I've installed DWIM Perl since I'd like to use Padre 0.92).

Carp comes with your Perl distribution, it is a core module. corelist (offline version) shows you the standard modules that come with various Perl versions. You'll see that Carp comes with all Perl versions as far back as 5. There's nothing to download. Just use Carp. One of the hard things to understand about Perl for many people is that certain functionality doesn't exist except in modules, but these modules come with Perl anyway. I've seen a lot of people use system cp or system find because they didn't realize that Perl comes with a module to copy files or to search a file in a directory tree. It's in a module that you have to use.

Try using the cpan command to download your modules. The cpan command will search for, download, compile, test, and install any module you need. One of the reasons people use Strawberry Perl over ActivePerl is that, historically, the cpan command worked better on Strawberry Perl than on Active Perl.

cpan doesn't work well on my system, it complains the system doesn't have an appropriate C compiler.
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Helen CraigmanMay 21 '12 at 15:23

@HelenCraigman That's going to be a problem whether or not you use CPAN. When you install Perl modules that include C source code, it must compile the programs. Are you sure you have Strawberry Perl installed? Strawberry Perl includes the development MinGW development environment which includes the correct C compiler, the correct make command, and all required libraries and headers. People like Strawberry Perl for Windows because it has everything required to install almost any Perl module in CPAN.
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David W.May 21 '12 at 19:02